“I see your point, and I’m happy to expedite the process.”
I shifted back to practical matters. “How long do you think it will take you to complete the assessment and data entry?”
“Realistically? Another six months. The balance will go faster because I’ve familiarized myself with the parameters and adapted my program to the Society’s use.”
That was about what I had expected, so I wasn’t disappointed. “I think you’ve made great progress, all things considered. After all, you weren’t expecting your task to triple overnight.” Nicholas had been working for me for months, but I realized once again how little I knew about him, apart from what I saw when he was at work. “Did you grow up in this area?”
He didn’t appear startled by my shift of subject. “In the suburbs, mainly.”
“Oh? Where? I live in Bryn Mawr.”
“Mostly north of Philadelphia—Jenkintown, Abington, that area.”
“Ah. I don’t know that area well. You live in the city now?”
“Yes, a few blocks from here. I walk to work—it seemed inefficient to waste time commuting.”
“What do you like to do, when you’re not working?”
“Read, mostly. Books, not digital.”
I thought about asking more questions, but this one-sided conversation was too much work. I’d have to give Nicholas points for doing his job well, but he was never going to win prizes for Mr. Congeniality. Still, that had never been part of the job description. His position was glorified technical support for collections management. “Well, Nicholas, thank you for the Water Works update. I’ll let you lead the discussion when we’re there. And I’ll look forward to reading your report,” I reminded him.
“Thank you, Nell,” Nicholas said.
I stood up as he left, wondering what it would take to get him to loosen up.
Once Nicholas was gone, I wanted to lay my head down on my desk and not think. But that wasn’t a good idea—I might drool on the priceless eighteenth-century mahogany with the original finish. No polyurethane here. Then I remembered that I had told James I’d look into any other people associated with the Society who had access to our collections. I thought about asking Shelby to come to my office but decided I needed to get the blood flowing to my head again, hoping that would help. I stopped at Eric’s desk and said, “I’m going to have a word with Shelby. You can call me there if anything critical comes up. Or if Marty stops by before I come back, you can send her down.”
“Will do, Nell.”
I walked down the hall and rapped on Shelby’s half-open door. She looked up from a pile of documents. “Hey, Nell. You slumming down here?”
“No, I’m doing a nostalgia tour for the good old days. Got a minute?”
“Sure do. Is this about the . . . you know what?”
“It is. After all, we don’t have anything else important to do.” I dropped into one of the chairs in front of her desk, after closing the door.
“You sound discouraged,” Shelby said, studying me.
“Don’t encourage me to feel discouraged. You remember we thought it might be a nice idea to use Edwin Forrest as the theme for the Board Bash? Whenever I’ve had a free moment, I’ve been trying to pull together what we had on him so we could take a look at it. And I can’t find the documents. I even asked for Felicity’s help, without exactly telling her why. All the documents have vanished, although most of the artifacts are where they should be. What do you make of that?”
“That’s a stumper,” Shelby said. “But how many people can there be who could get at all that stuff? You’ve got our board, all of whom have free access to the stacks. You’ve got a bunch of researchers, mostly local college professors or historians working on a book, plus a few genealogists for hire who come in and out. They’re all on record. Maybe someone has been secretly copying the keys of one of those people and using them behind their backs, in which case we’ll never find them. And don’t forget people who have left over the last few years. Have you collected all their keys? Or had the locks changed?”
“Of course not. We trust people here, which is why we keep losing things,” I said bitterly.
“That’s what I thought. And then we’d have to look at spouses, roommates, siblings, and so on, both past and present. And don’t forget our staff. Even you, Nell. I’ve seen you eyeing that statue downstairs. Maybe you have an unhealthy passion for Edwin, even though he’s dead. You sleep with his correspondence under your pillow.”
“I’m so glad I’ve made you discouraged, too. My work here is done,” I said. It seemed that my frustration was making me snarky.
“Ha! Well, for your information, lady, I’m way ahead of you—I already have the list of people we know have access.” She flipped through a pile of papers on her desk and pulled out two pages stapled together. “Here. You’ll probably recognize more names than I would.”
“Probably,” I said absently. “And I should have told you to eliminate the older ones—I’m pretty sure some on this list are too old to fit the bill.”
“Huh?” Shelby said, looking bewildered.
“Oh, shoot—did I forget to fill you in on that?” I quickly told her about the phone calls that Harby had finally remembered, and the mysterious visitor at Louisa Babcock’s rehab center. “So we’re looking for a thirtysomething guy, although I’m sure we have researchers that fit the bill.”
I scanned the list. As Shelby had suggested, there were few names I didn’t recognize, although I might be hard-pressed to put faces to all of them. As far as I could recall, most were sedate middle-aged people who wanted nothing more than to spend a quiet afternoon sitting in the library reading James Monroe’s correspondence.
I handed it back to her. “Okay, I’m out of ideas. Maybe Marty’s been killing people because she doesn’t have enough excitement in her life. You could mistake her voice on the phone for a young man’s. And all we know about any phone calls is what Marty said Harby told her, and if Marty’s the killer, she could have made up anything she wanted. Although there was that night attendant at the nursing home . . . I know, Marty dressed up in drag just to confuse people.”
“You’re right—you’re out of good ideas, and you’ve gone straight to the lousy ones. Speak of the devil . . . hi, Marty,” Shelby said.
Marty dropped heavily into the other chair. “You were talking about me?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I just accused you of murder. Heck, at this point framing you would be easier than finding the real killer. Please tell me you have something new,” I said.
Marty slumped even lower. “Not a thing. Nor have I heard from Jimmy today.”
“Neither have I. He’s probably busy working on things that can be solved. That would be the sensible and useful thing to do.”
“So what now?” Marty shot back.
“Marty, I really don’t know. Look at us—we’re historians, collectors, administrators. It’s ridiculous to expect that we can solve crimes.” I hated that I sounded whiny, even if what I said was true.
“Nonsense,” Marty replied firmly. “We’re smart. We’re trained in research. Nell, you’ve been in development, so you must have some skills in reading people.”
“I guess, but how far has all that gotten us? The thing I keep coming back to is, what’s the motive? Why this group of people, why now?”
“Good point,” Marty said. “Because the trust is about to be dissolved? Did that set this off?”
“How many people would know about that?” Shelby asked.
“Not many,” I replied. “The trustees themselves, and the lawyer—who I met with this morning. He’s an associate and looks about twelve. He’s had the file on the trust for maybe a year. And I asked about the appointed accountant working on the trust—he’s apparently disabled, which probably eliminates him as an active murderer. And even if people knew about the trust and its potential for going away, why would they care? Cui bono?”
“Who stands to lose anything if
the trust shuts down?” Marty asked. “We know the Edwin Forrest Home is moribund, and there are plenty of organizations in Philadelphia that could make better use of the space, whether or not it comes with any funding or endowment. Or they could tear it down and build something new on the property, especially if the price was right or it was given outright. Or the trust could really liquidate—sell the property and put the money to some better use. Of course, they’d need court approval, but I’m sure that could be managed.”
“Even if some group had its eye on the property, how does killing the trustees help them?” I asked, rubbing the bridge of my nose. I was getting very tired of thinking about this.
“Maybe it accelerates the schedule. Now that the trustees are in breach of the trust terms, the surviving members may be forced to do something. Or at least, the people involved would believe they have to do something. They’re honorable types. And the simplest solution now is to wrap it up and be done with it.”
“But that will take time, right? The trustees would have to vote to pursue dissolution, and then documents would have to be drawn up, and then they’d have to be presented to whichever court covers this, and you know how fast they move. Rodney and Louisa both said that the trustees hadn’t gone beyond talking about disbanding, and they’d asked the lawyer to look into the options, and he confirmed it. And from my conversation with him today, he hasn’t done much.”
“But that’s the way we see it,” Marty said. “Maybe someone else doesn’t know all that.”
“So you’re saying that we haven’t looked hard at the possible dissolution as a motive because we know it’s not happening anytime soon, but maybe someone else thinks it’s urgent?”
“Exactly,” Marty said triumphantly. “So we need to know who really has a stake in this. Like you said, cui bono? We go back to the beginning and look using that as a filter.”
“Can we do that in the morning?” Shelby said plaintively. “Because I really would like to get home in time for dinner.”
I checked my watch: well past five. “I think we’re burned out today. Let’s reconvene in the morning and look at the whole problem with fresh eyes.”
“What a brilliant idea, Madame President,” Shelby said, grinning. “Let’s do that!”
We went our own ways with one assignment: to think. As if I hadn’t been doing that. But tomorrow was another day, and maybe things would look brighter in the morning. I hoped.
CHAPTER 24
I find trains soothing, with their rhythmic clackety-clack and their stately deceleration and acceleration at stations, and I loved not having to do anything or talk to anyone—I could just sit until I got where I was going, leaving my mind free to roam.
On my ride home, my first thought was: the results of the brief discussion between Shelby, Marty, and me had again made it clear that we had always assumed that a killer did what he did for a rational reason and with a plan. What we had seen from our killer so far suggested intelligence and some skill. After all, he’d successfully evaded detection so far. But if I divorced the method from the rationale for the acts, that opened up a lot of possibilities. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how we were supposed to look for irrational ideas.
If this killer wanted only to indulge himself in a few murders, he surely could have chosen almost anyone other than a small group with obscure connections. We all agreed that somehow everything came back to the Forrest Trust. Someone was killing its trustees—but why?
I tried a different angle. Say somebody had buried something precious in the walls or floor of the former Edwin Forrest Home and was worried that a change in ownership might threaten either his chance of retrieving it, or its ongoing concealment? Remotely possible, depending on the timeline. I could probably find out whether the house had undergone any significant renovations in the last century or so, which might have uncovered the mystery item or destroyed it. But what could be hidden that would be so damning? Gold? Diamonds? Another, newer Forrest will? A dead body? It would be rather ironic if someone was willing to kill in order to prevent a dead body from being discovered, but not impossible.
Or how about: someone was offended that callous modern people wanted to break the trust so carefully created by Edwin Forrest? Edwin had wanted his name to live on after his death; he wanted to be remembered. But he did not foresee that there would be no more tenants for the home. Any money left, or received from the sale or transfer of his memorabilia, would be more useful in fulfilling the spirit of the trust and honoring his memory than would a crumbling, empty mansion.
Well, Nell, if you’re casting off the shackles of logic, why not go whole hog? What if the ghost of Edwin Forrest was doing it? No, it had to be someone corporeal to carry out the murders. I’d already dismissed the zombie theory. Well, what if someone had gone off the deep end and thought that the ghost was running the show? Such a person could be crazy enough to do anything and use the excuse: Edwin Forrest made me do it.
I knew I wasn’t equipped to put myself into the mind of a killer; I had trouble killing a spider. Still, there had to be some rationale. Money? I could understand that some people might kill for money, especially if it was a substantial amount. But how would it be possible to extract any money from the Forrest Trust, whether intact or dissolved? It had withstood any number of lawsuits when it was new, or so I had read. Was there a statute of limitations? Perhaps the law had changed enough or been reinterpreted enough that the trust might not be so invulnerable now. But I was not a lawyer, and Jacob Miller hadn’t expressed any concern when I’d talked to him, although there was no reason for him to share that kind of information with me. I put the whole idea aside to meditate on it. I wasn’t planning on doing anything about it tonight in any case. Dinner, a movie on cable, and bed—alone. That I could handle.
Even a good night’s sleep brought no new perceptions. I was almost afraid to open my paper on the train the next morning for fear that I’d find that yet another name had succumbed to a death that might look natural but which I knew most likely was not. I was beginning to feel ghoulish.
I like to solve problems and bring them to satisfying resolution. In the Forrest Trust problem, I had a heck of a puzzle but no logical answers. Most of my knowledge of serial killers came from popular media, which aimed for maximum shock value. How many pleasant, ordinary people harbored an urge to kill someone? I’d bet I would never know if I passed one on the street. We were all lucky that only a very small percentage acted on that impulse.
If this ever became an active investigation, James could check phone records, which might show that someone had called each victim before showing up and doing the deed. But if that person was smart, he or she would have used disposable phones that couldn’t be traced. Still, if each of the victims’ phone records showed a call from the same unidentifiable phone, that would at least reinforce our theory that there was one person behind all the deaths. Marty had said that Harby would be happy to share the records of the landline phone that he and his sister had used, but one phone number wouldn’t get us very far. Could James get hold of all the victims’ phone records without jumping through official hoops? I tried calling him again from my cell phone, both on his office phone and on his cell. No answer. In the end, I settled for leaving a message, telling him that I would be at the Water Works later in the day. It occurred to me that James knew far more about my job than I knew about his. I wasn’t sure if there were restrictions on what he could talk about with civilians, or whether FBI agents in general cultivated an aura of mystery, which made them appear far more powerful than in fact they were. I knew that James never talked about any cases that didn’t involve me, and I’d been surprised when he told me how many he and his colleagues handled at any one time. But I could dig up information that the FBI couldn’t. Local history, for one thing—most of that would never show up in a Google search because it existed in only one typescript copy in our stacks. Edwin Forrest had been a local boy who had made it big, yet he had chosen to make Phil
adelphia his home for most of his life, and he was buried here. Someone had collected all the written documentation we had about him at the Society—looking for something in particular? To keep it out of someone else’s hands? But what would be important enough in those records and artifacts to lead to murder?
I was starting to get seriously annoyed. How dare Edwin cause so much trouble this long after his death? I pulled from my bag the meager file of information that I had collected on my own and leafed through it. Forrest’s contentious ex-wife, Catherine Sinclair, seemed to have lived out her life in relative obscurity after their very messy divorce. I had come across a newspaper obituary for her that managed to avoid using her birth name altogether, identifying her only as “Mrs. Forrest,” even though they had been divorced for years and Edwin had already passed away by the time she died.
I was still curious about the Elizabeth Welsh mentioned in Edwin’s will: she was the only anomaly among his bequests. Who was she? Why had he left her money? The logical—or modern—conclusions were that either she was his child by an unknown liaison, or he’d been carrying on with her in his later years, when she was in her twenties. Shoot, maybe he was getting senile and had been taken by a pretty face. Stranger things had happened.
I knew that John Welsh, Elizabeth’s father of record, had died in 1874. When I looked at the 1880 census, there was Elizabeth—and a nine-year-old daughter also named Elizabeth, although no husband was listed for the elder Elizabeth. Edwin’s child? Or grandchild? Even if either was true, it was unlikely that I could ever prove it.
I tried to envision explaining to the police or the FBI that there was a serial killer on the loose who was obsessed with the long-dead actor Edwin Forrest. I could only imagine (and cringe at) what they would think.
When I arrived at the Society, Eric was already at his desk, as usual. He looked at me and said promptly, “I’ll get your coffee.”
Monument to the Dead Page 18
